March 2013

We are not done in Connecticut, even for this year. Two other bills are still in play. A competing online voting bill, and the UMOVEA bill. The last Committee meeting that can approve bills is Friday April 5th. Perhaps the competing bill will be dropped or also changed to a study. Perhaps the UMOVEA bill was mentioned because it contains provisions to help military vote, but likely not provisions for online voting. Beyond that all bills are subject to dramatic change and consolidation prior to votes by the Senate and House. Like last year, a section authorizing online voting could be stuffed into any other bill by the Committee, even a bill otherwise especially attractive the Governor.

Almost all the legislators from both parties made “political hay” (that is intended as a cliche like “fox in the hen house”) out of former and future candidate for Governor, Tom Foley’s testimony on legislative ethics. He admitted authorship of questionable concepts not worded to match his intent. I can only wonder what would happen if all bills were required to identify the author? Would I have tempered my remarks on early voting, had everyone known the source of that inadequate and contradictory text? Would the result be less bills with better text?

Connecticut does need to improve the voting process for military voters — but Internet voting is not the answer.

Every day, headlines reveal just how vulnerable and insecure any online network really is, and how sophisticated, tenacious and skilled today’s attackers are. Just last week, we learned that the U.S. has already experienced our first-ever documented attack on an election system, when a grand jury report revealed that someone hacked into the Miami-Dade primary elections system in August 2012.

On Wednesday night I participated on a panel in Waterford, CT on Electoral Dysfunction, sponsored by the ACLU, Common Cause and the LWV. It was a very good discussion with a variety of views from the panel, a wide range of excellent questions, and unsurpassed moderation. In the near future we may have video available. I promised to provide more information here on the topics covered.

Here in the land of steady habits, we are ready to move forward with blinders at the ready, apparently confident that our registrars, town clerks, and state IT department will never discover any attacks on on our voting systems, email systems, or fax machines.

All of these bills are well intended. In fact, I would support most of the concepts, yet in only a single case could I support one of these bills , based on huge gaps between the good intent and the actual details present and missing in those bills.

Now we have it, a redrafted S.B. 647. We do not know who was involved around the table rewriting it, yet what we have is almost an exact copy of the bill Governor Malloy vetoed last year as risky and unconstitutional.